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Title: 'The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming is Minutes Away From Being
Obsolete'

Link: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/26/0...

An anonymous reader shares a column: I'm going to take the diplomatic hat off
here and say with brutal honesty: basically everybody in the music business
hates Spotify except for the people who work there. It's a platform that
sucks artists for everything they have, it actively prevents community
building, and, despite all of that, the platform still struggles to maintain
a healthy profit margin. The streaming business model is fundamentally
broken. And eventually, its demise will become more and more obvious to
recognize. I'll break down exactly why the DSP era is coming to a grinding
halt, why the major labels are quietly terrified, and why the artists who
don't pivot now are going to go down with the ship. [...] Jimmy Iovine put it
bluntly: "The streaming services have a bad situation, there's no margins,
they're not making any money." This model only works for Apple, Amazon, and
Google, because they don't need their music platforms to be wildly
profitable. Amazon uses music as a loss-leader to keep you paying for Prime.
Apple uses it to sell $1,000 iPhones. As for Spotify, or any standalone music
streaming company, they're kind of screwed. And guess what -- when the
platform's margins are structurally squeezed, guess who gets squeezed first?
The artists. [...] What if Jimmy is right? If the DSPs are "minutes away from
obsolete," what replaces them? Well, I'm not sure the DSPs are going to
disappear overnight, but if you're an artist or a manager trying to sustain
yourself in this evolving music economy, the answer is direct ownership. The
artists who will survive the next five years are the ones who are quietly
shifting their focus away from the "ATM Machine." They are building their own
cultural hangars. They are capturing phone numbers on Laylo. They are driving
fans to private Discord servers. They are focusing on ARPF (Average Revenue
Per Fan) through high-margin merch, vinyl, and hard tickets, rather than
begging for fractions of a penny from a playlist placement. We are witnessing
the death of the "Mass Audience" and the birth of the "Micro-Community."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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